It’s broad daylight; the grass is green; the trees are in full bloom. One woman heard on the video recalls having been in the shower when she heard pops. Could it have been fireworks?

“Not this time of the day,” says a male voice, apparently from the person who shot the video on a cell phone. “There ain’t no fireworks this early.”

Those lined up outside the yellow police tape waste no time discussing, often in expletive-laden terms, what happened. And the video dutifully records it all.

It’s not clear who saw what or what exactly transpired. Regardless, a clear consensus emerges among those heard on the recording: The young man in the street — later ID’d as Michael Brown, an 18-year-old days away from starting classes at a technical college — was shot dead by a Ferguson police officer.

Authorities would later claim Brown attacked the officer in his car and tried to take his gun. But in the minutes after the shooting, the irate crowd on the Ferguson street comes to a different consensus, summed up by the video’s narrator: “They just killed this (man) for no reason.”

As Brown’s body lay prone — for minutes with no one, not even a police officer, in the camera’s sight — onlookers quickly establish one key fact amongst themselves: He wasn’t armed.

“There is nothing!” a woman yells out on the video. “Do you see a gun? Do you see a knife? Do you see anything that would have caused a threat to these (expletive) police officers?”

“They shot that boy because they wanted to shoot that boy.”

If the moments leading up to Brown’s shooting were frenetic, the moments afterward — at least right around his body — are eerily calm as captured on the continuing video.

For minutes, there is nothing and no one around his body. Just a young man with a white shirt flat on the street, all alone.

A police officer walks by two minutes into the video, and a minute later a man in a black shirt — who witnesses identify as a family member — approaches. But he’s quickly guided away by officers.

A short time later, a uniformed man — perhaps a paramedic — appears to check on Brown. Multiple officers eventually flank his body.

2 comments

bubba bexley

Brooke

This is a really tough one. We all know people do stupid things and his kid might have done something incredibly stupid to get himself shot by police. We also know that police generally win the he said she said battle, regardless of whether they are honest. All that said, it’s time to drop the racial BS. I really hope it turns out that the cop who fired the lethal shot was black so that they stop crying racism. The reasons behind the shooting are about 99% likely to be the same when a cop fires their gun, no matter the ethnicity of the officer or the civilian.